The vice president argued that putting bullets in his corpse was necessary to heal America's wounded heart. He knows not what he draws on.

I usually like Joe Biden's earnest, regular guy persona. The knock against him is that he's prone to putting his foot in his mouth. Almost every time he does so, I think it reflects poorly not so much on the vice president as the frivolous people who gleefully crow every time he phrases something poorly. They do so even when they know his intended meaning and that it is unobjectionable. It disgusts me when they do that. So I am often rooting for Biden amid his blunders.

But I didn't like his Thursday speech to the DNC. Oh, most of it was fine. He kept my attention, despite going on for almost 40 minutes, and his riff on a job meaning more than a paycheck was moving.

The section I didn't like was about Osama bin Laden. Biden sought to draw a contrast between President Obama and Mitt Romney on that issue by harkening back to a 2007 incident about whether it would be prudent to strike inside Pakistan to kill the terrorist leader, even without permission.

As a refresher, candidate Barack Obama said that he would order troops into Pakistan to get bin Laden, a position that Hillary Clinton immediately criticized. And Romney 2008 criticized Obama too. When I re-read the relevant quotes, it seems clear that Romney was objecting to Obama preemptively and needlessly announcing that he would violate the sovereignty of a nuclear-armed ally, even though he agreed that it might be necessary. Clinton and Romney were both right to criticize Obama at the time; and Romney is likely being misrepresented on this issue.

But that isn't actually what bothered me about Biden's riff on bin Laden. Let's see if you can guess what bothered me. Here's the relevant passage:

BIDEN: Look, Barack understood that the search for Bin Laden was about a lot more than taking a monstrous leader off the battlefield. It was about more than that. It was about righting an unspeakable wrong. Literally, it was about healing an unbearable wound -- a nearly unbearable wound in America's heart. And he also knew -- he also knew the message we had to send around the world. If you attack innocent Americans, we will follow you to the end of the earth!

Look, most of all, President Obama had an unyielding faith in the capacity and the capability of our special forces. Literally, the finest warriors in the history of the world.The finest warriors in the history of the world. So we sat -- we sat originally only five of us. We sat in the situation room beginning in the fall of the year before. We listened, we talked, we heard, and he listened, to the risk and reservations about the raid. He asked again the tough questions, he listened to the doubts that were expressed.

But when Admiral Mcraven looked him in the eye and said, ``sir, we can get this job done''. I sit next to him and I looked at your husband. And I knew, at that moment, he had made his decision. And his response was decisive. He said, "do it" and justice was done. Folks -- folks, Governor Romney didn't see things that way. When he was asked about Bin Laden in 2007 here's what he said, he said, "it is not worth moving heaven and Earth and spending billions of dollars just to catch one person."

(AUDIENCE): Booo.

BIDEN: But he was wrong. He was wrong. Because if you understood that America's heart had to be healed, you would have done exactly what the president did and you would move heaven and Earth to hunt him down and to bring him to justice.

So here we have two arguments for why it was worth spending billions and "moving heaven and earth" to kill one man. Argument number one is that America must send a signal that if someone murders thousands of our citizens, we will not stop until he is brought to justice: a reasonable argument, and one that Americans routinely apply in our criminal-justice system. A serial killer is hunted by law enforcement until he is arrested. There isn't a cost-benefit calculation about whether it's worth catching that particular guy. Our commitment to justice itself is implicated.

But Biden's second argument? It's a doozy. As he tells it, America had a wound in its heart ("literally," somehow); America's heart had to be healed; and only killing Bin Laden could heal it.

That logic creeps me out. For starters, the figurative wound in America's heart is inextricably connected to the murdered Americans who aren't coming back. Killing Bin Laden was just. I am glad that it was accomplished. But it didn't heal the hearts of the people who lost loved ones. They need to look elsewhere for solace. Nor did it heal our collective heart, if it even makes sense to speak of such a thing. And it certainly wasn't a precondition for healing. Had Bin Laden never been caught, had he lived out his life in a cave and died an old man 40 years hence, are we to believe that for decades on end the United States would have remained broken?

That is giving a murderous terrorist far too much power.

Why do we keep doing that?

One needn't underrate the importance of justice to understand a lesson at least as old as scripture: that neither justice nor vengeance nor any sort of killing whatever heals a wounded heart. Love, grace, and time, those can all heal, but not a bullet in bin Laden's corpse. Was it satisfying? To millions of Americans, unquestionably and understandably, partly because we humans are fallen.

Prudence demands that we distinguish between "satisfying" and "healing."

There is a human impulse, prudently tamed by civilization, to take the corpse of a man like Bin Laden, string it up in a public square, and invite local firemen to come desecrate it with their axes.

Said Alistair Horne, a historian, describing a 1610 episode in Paris just after the execution of a man who assassinated the king:

When what remained of the regicide finally expired, "the entire
populace, no matter what their rank, herled themselves on the body with
their swords, knives, sticks or anything else to hand and began beating,
hacking and tearing at it. They snatched the limbs from the
executioner, savagely copping them up and dragging the pieces through
the streets." Children made a bonfire and flung remnants of Ravaillac's
body on to it. According to a witness, one woman actually ate some of
the flesh. The executioner, who was supposed to have the body of the
regicide reduced to ashes in order to complete the ritual as demanded by
the law, could find nothing to bring his task to completion but the
assassin's shirt. Seldom, even at the height of the Terror, can the
Paris mob have acted with greater ferocity...

Joe Biden is surely as repulsed by the passage above as any of us. But the argument he advanced -- that America can heal itself only insofar as it "moves heaven and earth" to kill deserving enemies, no matter the cost -- shares more in common with the Paris mob than is prudent.

It is bellicose and irrational. It risks permitting savage enemies to make savages of us, and misunderstands how healing is actually accomplished. And it implies that the president of the United States should make decisions about whether to kill based partly on how it affects our psyche.

Decisions ought to be grounded only in what is just and what keeps us safe. So for once, Joe Biden has made a substantive gaffe.

About the Author

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

Most Popular

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

This article is from the archive of our partner .

We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

After the Times ran a column giving employers tips on how to deal with Millennials (for example, they need regular naps) (I didn't read the article; that's from my experience), Slate's Amanda Hess pointed out that the examples the Times used to demonstrate their points weren't actually Millennials. Some of the people quoted in the article were as old as 37, which was considered elderly only 5,000 short years ago.

The age of employees of The Wire, the humble website you are currently reading, varies widely, meaning that we too have in the past wondered where the boundaries for the various generations were drawn. Is a 37-year-old who gets text-message condolences from her friends a Millennial by virtue of her behavior? Or is she some other generation, because she was born super long ago? (Sorry, 37-year-old Rebecca Soffer who is a friend of a friend of mine and who I met once! You're not actually that old!) Since The Wire is committed to Broadening Human Understanding™, I decided to find out where generational boundaries are drawn.